“The Global LEI will be a marathon, not a sprint” is a phrase heard more than once during our series of Hot Topic webinars that’s charted the emergence of a standard identifier for entity data. Doubtless, it will be heard again.

But if we’re not exactly sprinting, we are moving pretty swiftly. Every time I think there’s nothing more to say on the topic, there is – well – more to say. With the artifice of the March ‘launch date’ behind us, it’s time to deal with reality. And the reality practitioners are having to deal with is one that’s changing rapidly.

Thomson Reuters has set out its store on symbology saying it does not support the promotion of new identifiers as a means of improving data management, but is keen to support industry standards and has plans to offer services such as symbology cross-referencing to ease the burden on data managers.

The company documents the development of symbology, its use and complexity in a white paper authored by Jason du Preez, head of symbology services at Thomson Reuters, and entitled ‘Solving for Symbology Discord, the Identity Challenge’.

Thomson Reuters set up a symbology business last year and published the white paper to acknowledge the importance of symbology and recognise its challenges. Du Preez says: “We don’t believe there is a silver bullet that will answer the problems of symbology. Innovative new products continue to exacerbate the problem and that is not going to change. We can, using our core competencies, create linkages, invest to take on the burden of linking data sets, and maintain code mapping. And we can allow the market to make more use of our intellectual property.”

Du Preez cites licences introduced last summer to extend the use of the company’s proprietary Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs) in non real-time content, as well as its agreement in response to a European Commission antitrust investigation to extend the use of RICs in real-time consolidated data feeds, as moves to open up how RICs are licensed and make them more accessible across all asset classes.

Integration of RICs with Proprietary Identifiers

He says: “As there is no silver bullet, we will invest more in cross-referencing services and tie in quality of information. We will have interesting things to offer over the next 18 months.” Among these he lists the integration of RICs and proprietary identifiers, with firms submitting their codes to Thomson Reuters and the company playing them back as part of its own codes. Other broad cross-referencing services will be tailored to allow clients to access only required cross references and linkages.

“Thomson Reuters doesn’t promote a new code, there are enough out there already. We will continue to use existing codes and extract value from them; the key is linkages between market vendor codes and proprietary structures. While clients face regulatory and cost drivers, we will take care of linkages and cross referencing to improve the breadth and quality of client content.”

Thomson Reuters’ white paper details the development of symbology and notes the company’s intent, as described by du Preez. It starts by mentioning irregular incidents in the market that remind the industry of the challenges involved when an aggregated or consolidated view across positions is needed, including the incompatibility of core data symbols. The paper states: “The core elements: security identification, counterparty identification and price discovery, were never developed to work efficiently and effectively on an enterprise/global scale.”

Looking at the current state of symbology, the paper flags the fragmented identification methods resulting form the market’s approach to symbology, including data providers’ and data aggregators’ different means of identifying the various parts of securities or counterparties, as well as firms’ creation of proprietary identifiers to fill gaps in vendor provision. The paper reports: “[Symbology] is still a ‘cottage industry’ where the identification schemes put in place by one group are locally focused and usually limited to a specific slice of the securities market. This consumes resources: in many cases the task of mapping multiple sets of disjointed or partially overlapping symbols can consume as much (or more) development time and computing resource as programming the business logic itself.”

The paper reviews changes in the financial industry since 1993 that have complicated symbology and notes the increasing difficulty, yet increasing need, to integrate information across a firm’s complete range of trading businesses to achieve effective risk management. On the flip side, it points to the parallel need to analyse rapidly growing stores of information and connect increasingly diverse datasets to find relevant information in the quest for alpha. It states: “The sophistication of the methods we employ to aggregate, rationalise and navigate information bears a direct relationship to the size of the lead a firm can have in the financial marketplace.”

How to Unambiguously Identify Information

While the outcome of linking and navigating information can be positive, it presents significant challenges as a lack of consistent and comprehensive global industry standards means firms must maintain symbology cross references, a difficult and often flawed task, particularly in banks with many different trade and compliance-related systems. Du Preez writes: “A popular approach is ‘we can build an adaptor’. Adaptors have become some of the most complex processes in banking technology. That is not data management. It is trying not to get eaten by the alligators.” He goes on to surmise: “Data managers do not want to deal with these problems – they ultimately want services they can reliably use to unambiguously identify information.”

Enter Thomson Reuters with its vision of how to resolve these problems. “We believe that these linkages are the key to enormous untapped value. Being able to enter the data model through any entity identifier (quote, security or legal entity) and easily navigate and explore all the linkages between related entities not only puts a firm in control of its risk position, but also creates a window into opportunities. Industry standards have a significant part to play as they provide a universal start and end point; Thomson Reuters is a strong supporter of symbology standards in the data industry and we will be first in line to adopt and link industry standard identifiers to our content sets.”

The report discusses the challenges propagated by the use of multiple symbologies and the workload associated with the maintenance of cross reference tables in local security master databases. It touches on Thomson Reuters’ plans to provide cross reference services centrally and leverage its core competencies and infrastructure to ease the burden on institutions that have traditionally solved the problems themselves.

It states: “Cross referencing is a reality that cannot be avoided – we aim to make this as accurate and cost-effective as possible for our customers. We also understand that while symbology is an important part of the picture, translation and synchronisation services will also play a critical part. The need for these services is evidenced by the burgeoning desire of the market to offload these onerous data management functions to specialist providers.” The report concludes: “Thomson Reuters is investing now to continue to expose the growing capabilities of its data management infrastructure and ensure that structured and unstructured data come together in a rich tapestry of knowledge with the aim of maximizing utility to trading algorithms, research, analysis and information discovery.”

The European Commission has ended its lengthy enquiry into Thomson Reuters’ licensing policies for Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs), accepting commitments from the company that will create a more fluid market for real-time consolidated data feeds. The deal creates a new environment for Thomson Reuters as it finds itself competing in an increasingly open market.

The company welcomed the Commission’s decision – perhaps on the basis of the end of the enquiry rather than the commitments it must stick to – and was quick to point out that its new licensing commitment is consistent with the move it made in June 2012 to make RICS available foruse with non-real-time information in client and non-client financial institutions’ trade processing systems. At that time, Thomson Reuters’ then-Enterprise content chief Gerry Buggy, described the move as the “first step in supporting the financial community’s symbology needs across all parts of the trading life cycle through our evolving symbology services.”

The Commission made its decision to end the enquiry after accepting commitments put forward by Thomson Reuters in May 2012 that were then market tested with a third-party comment period running until August 2012. The commitments have been made legally binding, with the key outcomes being that Thomson Reuters’ customers can continue to use RICs in real-time applications after they have switched to an alternative real-time consolidated data feed provider and use RICs in combination with the alternative provider’s data.

Commenting on the Commission’s decision, Commission vice president of competition policy, Joaquin Almunia, says: “Information plays a key role in ensuring that financial markets operate in a healthy and efficient way. In order to correctly assess investment opportunities, market participants need to access accurate and timely financial data, for example through consolidated real-time data feeds. The commitments offered by Thomson Reuters will enhance competition in this market. Financial institutions that use RICs will now be able to switch to alternative providers more easily.”

Responding to the Commission’s decision to adopt Thomson Reuters’ commitments, David Craig, president of Financial & Risk at the company, says: “Following a detailed examination of the facts, the Commission accepted our proposal without any finding of infringement of EU competition law by Thomson Reuters. We now look forward to continuing to work with our customers to bring world-class, real-time data feed and symbology solutions to market.”

In essence, Thomson Reuters’ commitments allow customers to license additional RICs usage rights for the purpose of switching data vendors and to use RICs for retrieving data from other providers against a monthly licence fee. The company will also provide customers with the necessary information to map RICs to alternative symbology, and allow third parties to develop and maintain switching tools that allow RICs and rival services to interoperate by mapping RICs to the financial identifiers of other data feed providers. Third-party developers can use and keep RICs in their switching tools on payment of a monthly licence.

If the Commission’s decision is favourable for users of consolidated real-time data feeds, it must also be of great interest to their suppliers, with 2013 promising to be both a battleground and a peace mission as suppliers struggle to maintain market share while responding to market demand for more open symbology solutions.

As a follow up on G20 acceptance in Los Cabos in July 2012 and the Financial Stability Board guidelines and recommendations of the Legal Entity Identifier LEI, we will regularly update this post with news and article to provide an overview of LEI standard progress and development.

Exchange Data International (EDI), a premier back office financial data provider, today announced it adopted Bloomberg’s Global Securities Identifiers (‘BBGID’) to name and track all equities securities in its Worldwide Corporate Actions service.

EDI is the latest financial data provider to adopt Bloomberg’s Open Symbology (BSYM), an open and free-use system for naming global securities across all asset classes with a BBGID, a 12 digit alpha-numeric identifier for financial instruments. EDI has implemented BBGID numbers in its equities reference, pricing and corporate actions data feeds. Its Worldwide Corporate Actions service provides detailed information on 50 corporate action event types affecting equities listed on 160 exchanges.

“EDI decided to integrate Bloomberg’s Open Symbology, as it is easily accessible and has no license fee or restrictions on usage,” said Jonathan Bloch, the Chief Executive Officer of EDI. “Bloomberg’s Symbology also advances straight-through processing of equity orders, which aids reporting and compliance management.”

Peter Warms, Global Head of Bloomberg Open Symbology, said, “Existing identifiers that change due to underlying corporate actions introduce inefficiencies, increase costs and add complexity to the data management process. Bloomberg and EDI recognise the importance of comprehensive, open and unchanging identifiers, like the BBGID, in enabling customers to track unique securities consistently and to process corporate action data seamlessly. As BSYM grows in adoption, interoperability across market systems and software using BSYM will improve steadily and reduce operational costs.”

The industry initiative to develop and promote a standard global legal entity identifier (LEI) is expected to significantly reduce the opacity associated with complex financial instruments, widely acknowledged to be a major contributing factor in the 2008 credit crisis.

In this white paper, Bloomberg explains the implications of the emerging LEI for financial institutions, and outlines how it is embracing the new standard to help clients better understand the entities whose instruments they trade and hold (like mapping of LEI to Blombergs numeric BUID, etc.)

Thomson Reuters is taking a step toward answering client calls for more open access to its Reuters Instrument Code (RIC) symbology. The company is making RICs available for use with non-real-time information in client and non-client financial institutions’ trade processing systems.

Enterprise content chief Gerry Buggy, who has spearheaded Thomson Reuters’ response to the EC anti-competition complaint, the new facility is the “first step in supporting the financial community’s symbology needs across all parts of the trading life cycle through our evolving symbology services.”

The move comes in the wake of the EC investigation and subsequent complaint into the use of RICs in real-time consolidated data feeds. In response to that complaint, many financial services practitioners have called for more open access to the RIC, which is entrenched in many firms front-, middle- and back-office trading and trade processing systems.

According to Jason du Preez, Global Business Manager, Enterprise Platform, at Thomson Reuters, the latest initiative “has nothing to do with the EC investigation. The EC is focused on use of RICs for accessing real-time information, while the new licences are focused at firms looking to trade with the RIC or use the RIC to access non-real-time information.”

Du Preez says that latest move means that “any market participant can buy a license that will allow them to trade using the RIC. This will allow the use of the RIC for pre- and post-trade activities, and the right to redistribute RICS in this regard.”

The new RICs arrangement will allow market participants to use and cross-reference the RIC symbol for trade activities. As such, it can be used to facilitate the advertisement of liquidity, acceptance of trade flow and execution of post trade activities with the RIC symbol as a consistent identifier throughout the process.

Additionally, the service will allow Thomson Reuters pricing and reference data customers to use RICs to reference and retrieve securities data from their securities master databases and navigate to connected content such as legal entity identifier (LEI) information.

Du Preez says that “Firms that purchase reference data from Thomson Reuters will also be granted the right to use the RIC to access any non-real-time information, essentially allowing them to use the RIC to access any content, including third-party party content, held in their securities master databases.”

Thomson Reuters believes the new service will encourage more efficient and reliable capital markets by giving market participants the freedom to use RICs symbols irrespective of whether they use Thomson Reuters enterprise data products.

As part of the latest initiative, the Bats Chi-X Europe exchange has signed up for the service, which will allow it to deploy RICs in the post-trade services it offers.

According to Paul O’Donnell, COO at BATS Chi-X Europe, “Cross-referencing the BATS Chi-X Europe instrument codes with the Thomson Reuters RIC symbols will enable us to reach new market participants as well as improve efficiency and data transparency by facilitating accurate identification of securities on our platform.”

Du Preez says obvious candidates for adopting the new arrangement include “trade hubs, third-party trade/post-trade processing firms or anyone that wants to send, receive or cross reference messages that contain securities identified with a RIC.”

The morning after the G-20 leaders endorsed the Financial Stability Board’s recommendations for a global system of precisely identifying legal entities, the co-chairwoman of the LEI Trade Association Group said, “I think we have something that is real and ready for use.’’

Robin Doyle, a senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase, noted that 20,000 ready-to-use “legal entity identifiers” have already been generated by a prototype jointly developed by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. A copy of that file can be downloaded here.

The online portal that would allow financial market participants to register and receive 20-character ID codes and to search for the codes of counterparties or other entities was demonstrated Wednesday morning at the 2012 Technology Leaders Forum of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

That portal can be turned live “within 24 hours” of its need, said Mark Davies, Vice President, Business Development at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, during the demonstration.

The LEI Trade Association Group represents a group of firms and financial industry trade associations trying to develop a global and uniform legal entity identifier. The group is supported by the Global Financial Markets Association, which includes SIFMA.

SIFMA and a variety of other trade groups have recommended that DTCC and SWIFT operate a central authority for registering and issuing the codes that the leaders of the G-20 industrial nations Tuesday endorsed.

The G-20 endorsed the 35 recommendations of an international coordinator known as the Financial Stability Board.

The board’s recommendations differed in one significant aspect from the SIFMA and trade association recommendation. Where the trade groups recommended a centralized system for registering and issuing ID codes – a point reinforced Tuesdya in opening remarks at SIFMA Tech by SIFMA president T. Timothy Ryan Jr. – the FSB recommended a “federated” registration model. Under that approach, local authorities, aka nations, could and theoretically would act as the agencies for registration, issuing and storing the codes.

The central authority would maintain a database that would be logically managed, but whose contents might be spread around the world, as on servers spread across the Internet.

“We think it can work,” but it has to be set up and maintained properly, Doyle said.

The federated model will only be as good as it adheres to the global standards set by the FSB and the International Organization for Standardization, which defined the 20-character code.

Doyle said a central authority under the FSB approach likely will need to conduct audits of local operating units, to ensure compliance with the overall standards. The challenge will be to make sure the codes are kept correctly and not, in some fashion, duplicated.

The local authorities will need to take on the expense of maintaining high standards. “It is an expensive, difficult process to validate data,” Doyle said.

“A public-facing system like this needs a huge amount of control,” Davies said.

The next shoe to drop on the development of the system will come within the next couple weeks. That’s when Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Scott O’Malia said a decision will be announced on what organization or organizations will handle the registration and issuance of ID codes for the swaps markets it will oversee. O’Malia said at SIFMA Tech Tuesday that the decision among what industry executives say are four competing proposals will come “very soon.”

Srinivas Bangarbale, the CFTC’s Chief Data Officer, said Wednesday that the regulator’s “interim compliant identifier” will support the ISO 17442 standard set out by the FSB and ISO. r

It’s decision to move ahead “presupposed the standard” and that the chosen implementing group would “adopt the standards as published.” The CFTC will not directly or indirectly create another set of reference data for the industry to keep track of

“It’s important to use the standard as soon as possible,” he said, however.

O’Malia said the CFTC is likely to begin issuing IDs as early as September. That is so the commission can fulfill its mandate to oversee interest-rate and credit-default swap markets, as mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

The FSB’s implementation schedule calls for a functional system to be ready to use by March 2013.

Thomson Reuters has failed to appease EU antitrust bodies over proposed concessions in the way it licenses the proprietary Reuters Instrument Codes.

In 2009 the European Commission opened antitrust proceedings against Thomson Reuters over possible abuse of its dominant market position in the supply of RICs – codes that identify securities and are used by financial institutions to retrieve data from Thomson Reuters’ real-time feeds.The EC argued that the firm could be abusing its dominant position in the market for these consolidated real-time datafeeds by stopping customers from using RICs for retrieving data from alternative providers and mapping them for such a purpose to alternative symbols.

In an attempt to ward off further action by the Commission, the vendor agreed to let customers license RICs for mapping purposes over a five-year period for a monthly fee based on the number of RIC symbols to be used.

However, in a speech in Copenhagen today, EU competition chief Joaquín Almunia, said that a market test of the new measures had failed to deliver a desirable outcome.

“We have now reached a critical stage in this investigation,” said Almunia. “If no effective solution can be agreed upon, then we will have to draw the adequate conclusions.”

The company could face fines of up to 10% of its turnover if it does not offer further concessions to users.

Thomson Reuters’ rival Bloomberg has moved to make its own proprietary symbology available for free to developers and market practitioners.

The idea of an LEI pre-dates the 2008 financial crisis by several decades. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) had advocated an LEI (at one time called the IBEI – International Business Entity Identifier) for many years, but was unable to pinpoint an organization ready to build and maintain such a directory. For many securities industry participants, existing identifiers, such as the Bank Identifier Code (BIC), met most of the market’s needs.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers revealed the problems firms faced in readily identifying their counterparty exposure. With critical data residing in multiple, unconnected silos, many firms had no way to calculate their counterparty risk across front, middle, and back office systems. This damaged reputations, led to tremendous financial losses, unleashed law suits, and brought into focus the dire need for a system to uniquely identify entities.

The development of the standardised legal entity identifier (LEIs) is very much underway, but how can firms and market participants utilise this new identifier to improve internal data flow and risk monitoring processes whilst also meeting the regulatory reporting requirements?

Bloomberg is opening its market data interfaces for use by technology professionals globally, without cost or restriction, the company announced today. Bloomberg’s application programming interface, known as BLPAPI, is used daily by more than 100,000 professionals across the financial services industry and is now publicly available under a free-use license.

BLPAPI powers global market data distribution to desktops, workgroups and enterprise applications. In addition to Bloomberg Professional service subscribers, non-Bloomberg customers, vendors and software developers can now use BLPAPI as an alternative to proprietary technologies for market data distribution. This is Bloomberg’s latest move in support of its Open Market Data Initiative – an ongoing effort to embrace and promote open solutions for the financial services industry.

“We intend to evolve BLPAPI into an open standard with the help of an independent committee charged with managing the future development and stability of a truly open market data interface,” said Shawn Edwards, Chief Technology Officer of Bloomberg LP. “Open technologies allow our customers, partners, and others to direct resources towards developing innovative services instead of coping with rigid technologies.”

Bloomberg’s open API follows the release of Bloomberg’s Open Symbology (BSYM), a system to identify securities across all global asset classes. BSYM is an alternative to proprietary security identifiers that has been adopted by leading global securities exchanges and financial services organizations.

The BLPAPI interface works with a comprehensive set of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl. Other benefits of using Bloomberg’s API include:

• A comprehensive technical definition of a market data interface that includes publish/subscribe, request/response, all built on a flexible service-oriented design,

• An MIT-style license that allows users to copy and use BLPAPI interfaces for use with any market data service, applications or adapter technology,

• A simple and intuitive interface technology that is suitable for high volume and low latency applications.

* Bloomberg is offering its programming interface (BLPAPI) under a free-use agreement. This does not apply to any content.

A new system giving financial institutions standardized Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) will start to be phased in next year after an international organization finalizes new standards in January 2012.

The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is expected to approve a plan for LEIs at the beginning of next year, calling for them to consist of 20 alphanumeric characters. After that happens, the infrastructure is already in place to start issuing the IDs early in 2012, according to officials with the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

“Assuming the standard is approved by early January, our expectations are that legal entities will be able to register in short order for an LEI,” said Tom Price, managing director and head of SIFMA’s technology, operations and business continuity planning group.

During the financial crisis, both regulators and institutions realized they did not have the information available to quickly address issues of counterparty risk. LEIs aim to change that by using a universal code that would allow counterparties to be easily identified.

The United States has provided much of the leadership behind the push for LEIs, but the concept enjoys broad support around the globe. The registering authority for LEIs will not come from any government, but rather from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).

After the ISO finalizes the standard, the next step will be rule writing, which is already underway at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with respect to swaps. Price said LEIs will be used first for swaps participants and then gradually adopted for transactions involving other types of assets until they are required for all trades.

David Strongin, who is also a managing director at SIFMA, said the U.S. will be the first country to require LEIs, but Hong Kong and Canada will likely follow fairly quickly. The European Union has committed to adopting LEIs as well, though it is unclear whether Europe will adopt the system all at once or phase it in country by country.

Strongin stressed, however, that there is a global consensus to move forward, even if not every nation and region mandates LEIs at the same time.

“The G20, both the finance ministers and leaders, have all endorsed this,” Strongin said. “From a very high level, you don’t see disagreement that an LEI is needed. I think everyone agrees that it’s an important tool to build the foundation for risk management.”

Strongin said that while many traders might not see it right now, most firms are currently working hard to prepare for LEIs. Eventually, however, the changes will touch every facet of the industry. “There’s a lot of work going on, though there’s only so much you can do until you see the final rules,” Price added.

The migration plans of data giant Bloomberg to gradually move users from its BUID identifier to its new Bloomberg Global ID (BBGID), which is at the heart of its open symbology initiative, have hit a roadblock. Users have exerted pressure on the vendor to step back from the initial migration timeline and to maintain support for the BUID indefinitely, and the vendor has agreed, for now at least.